Litecoin officially locks in SegWit and is about to enter the activation phase

Litecoin has exceeded the number of signaling blocks needed to activate Segregated Witness (SegWit). As a result, SegWit has officially been locked in Litecoin. The SegWit development team wrote:

“Once SegWit is locked in, the next step is activation.”

Locking Segregated Witness

Earlier this Wednesday, Litecoin founder Charlie Lee tweeted:

“Litecoin SegWit will be locked in in approximately 19 hours, but we have already reached the required number of signaling blocks (6048) for activation.”

Soon after, Litecoin’s official Twitter account also announced the news.

The threshold for SegWit activation in Litecoin is different from that of Bitcoin SegWit. The Litecoin development team has set the threshold at 75% of blocks signaling support. Specifically, Litecoin tracking website Litecoinblockhalf explains that "6048 of the 8064 blocks need to signal support for SegWit in order to reach the "locked" state." According to the website's data, 6328 of the 7911 blocks (or 79.99%) are currently signaling support for SegWit, and "after an activation period, SegWit will be officially activated in Litecoin."

At the same time, all miners and nodes are encouraged to upgrade their software to the latest version. The SegWit development team said:

“Once SegWit is locked in, it will activate. This means that all full nodes running SegWit code will begin requiring miners to enforce the new SegWit consensus rules.”

The Road to SegWit Activation

In February of this year, Litecoin developers led by Charlie Lee began pushing for SegWit to be added to Litecoin. However, unlike closely following the Bitcoin SegWit plan, the Litecoin team decided to lower the SegWit activation threshold from 95% to 75%.

Charlie Lee

Last week, the Litecoin community held a global roundtable meeting. Several large Litecoin mining pool operators and exchanges reached an agreement to jointly build the foundation for activating SegWit.

Influenced by the news of SegWit’s upcoming activation, Litecoin’s price has risen from $4 at the end of March to nearly $16 as of press time, and its market capitalization has reached approximately $743 million.

Other Altcoins Using SegWit

Litecoin will officially become the second cryptocurrency to add SegWit to its source code. A smaller altcoin called Groestlcoin was the first to adopt the change on its mainnet. The three-year-old cryptocurrency currently has a market cap of $1.6 million. It is currently priced at less than three cents, but has been growing over the years. In January of this year, Groestlcoin updated its code to include SegWit, and on its third anniversary in late March, Groestlcoin officially activated SegWit.

Another altcoin, Vertcoin, is scheduled to activate SegWit via a user activated soft fork (UASF) shortly after Litecoin activates SegWit, scheduled for May 31. Currently, the majority of Vertcoin’s hashrate has not signaled support for SegWit, but its developers and community are pushing for SegWit.

Meanwhile, other altcoins such as Viacoin, Syscoin, and Digibyte have already added SegWit to their respective development roadmaps.

Litecoin’s Lightning Network

Both Litecoin and Groestlcoin have begun researching the next step after SegWit: deploying the Lightning Network (LN). On Tuesday, French Bitcoin technology company Acinq announced that they have tested the Lightning Network on the Litecoin test network, which has been running SegWit for several weeks.

The company wrote:

“With the upcoming release of alpha 3 of eclair 0.2, we took a look at what we needed to make it run on Litecoin.”

“We successfully ran eclair on the Litecoin testnet without even making any changes to the code.”

Acinq claimed, “In fact, we are running very well, all we had to do was change some configurations.” Although there are still some things that need to be adjusted, they believe that “it is very possible that Litecoin will make the first Lightning Network payment with real value.”